Donald Tyson - Essential Tarot Writings

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

Essential Tarot Writings: A Collection of Source Texts in Western Occultism 2020 by Donald Tyson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Publications, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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First e-book edition 2020

E-book ISBN: 9780738766348

Cover art of Hanged Man card from the Minchiate deck, courtesy of Lo Scarabeo

Cover design: Shannon McKuhen

Interior art:

cards are from Court de Gbelins Le Monde Primitif, vol. 8 (1781), with modifications by the author.

art is by Donald Tyson.

art is by Donald Tyson.

art is from The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall.

art is from The Book of Days by Robert Chambers.

Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tyson, Donald, author.

Title: Essential tarot writings : a collection of source texts in Western

occultism / by Donald Tyson.

Description: First edition. | Woodbury, Minnesota : Llewellyn Worldwide,

[2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: This

book gathers together some of the most important, but most obscure,

essays on the esoteric Tarot that were written by prominent occultists

of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Edited and

annotated by Donald TysonProvided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020034204 (print) | LCCN 2020034205 (ebook) | ISBN

9780738765372 (paperback) | ISBN 9780738766348 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: TarotHistorySources. | Fortune-telling by

cardsHistorySources.

Classification: LCC BF1879.T2 T974 2020 (print) | LCC BF1879.T2 (ebook) |

DDC 133.3/2424dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034204

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034205

Llewellyn Publications does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

Any Internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific reference will continue or be maintained. Please refer to the publishers website for links to current author websites.

Llewellyn Publications

Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

2143 Wooddale Drive

Woodbury, MN 55125

www.llewellyn.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

For my wife, Jenny,

my constant companion on
this mystery tour we call life.

Contents

by Antoine Court de Gbelin

by Louis Raphal Lucrce de Fayolle, the Comte de Mellet

Both essays translated from the French by Donald Tyson.

by P. D. Ouspensky

by Donald Tyson

by J. W. Brodie-Innes

Extract from by W. Wynn Westcott

by A. E. Waite.

by Manly P. Hall

from Breslaws Last Legacy .

I. by Phillip Breslaw

from The Universal Dream Book .

II. by Mother Bridget

from Chamberss Book of Days .

III.

from The History of Playing Cards .

IV.

from A Manual of Cartomancy .

V.

from Card Fortune Telling .

VI.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

T he essays gathered together here span three centuries and two continents. The earliest was published in 1781 in Paris and the latest in 1928 in Los Angeles. What ties them together is their focus on the symbolism of cards, and the use of cards in the Western esoteric tradition for divination and practical magic.

The majority of these essays concern the Tarot, which became so central to Western occultism during the nineteenth century, first in France and then later in England and the United States; but the final part of the work deals with fortune-telling with common playing cards using what was known as the English Method . The primary characteristic of this method, popular in England from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, is its reliance on the full deck of fifty-two playing cards laid out in rows of nine. This method was included because the divinatory folk meanings for playing cards have many correspondences with the divinatory meanings for the Tarot, particularly with the Tarot folk meanings for the suit cards, and also because the method of divination by nines may be readily applied to the Tarot.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the occult Tarot owes everything to France, and that it originated from the pen of a single man, Antoine Court de Gbelin, the author of the monumental Monde Primitif , a work on philology, linguistics, history, archaeology, philosophy, religion, and occultism in nine volumes that were published from 1773 to 1782. The essay by Court de Gbelin that opens this book appeared in the eighth volume, published in 1781, and it is without question the most important essay ever written on the occult Tarot.

Included by Court de Gbelin directly after his own essay was an essay on the occult Tarot by Louis Raphal Lucrce de Fayolle, the Comte de Mellet. Taken together, these two essays establish the place of the Tarot at the center of the modern tradition of Western magic. All that comes after was inspired by the work of these two men.

It was Court de Gbelin who fixed the origin of the Tarot in ancient Egypt. It was he who identified it as a symbolic book of Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom and magic. He also associated the Tarot with the Romanies and credited them with carrying it out of Egypt and spreading it throughout Europe. In the word Tarot he found the Egyptian root words for the royal way ( Ta-Ros ). The Tarot, he believed, was a sacred book of the Egyptian priesthood in which was concealed under a cloak of symbolism all their esoteric wisdom.

The Comte de Mellet supported the Egyptian origin of the Tarot. His essay is noteworthy for its explicit connection of the Tarot trumps with the Hebrew letters, which Court de Gbelin only hinted at, and for his arrangement of the trumps in three groups of seven cards each, coupled with the solitary unnumbered Fool, to which he assigned the zero. Court de Gbelin mentioned this threefold division of the trumps into sevens plus the Fool, but did not examine it at length. Comte de Mellet also compared the Tarot with common playing cards and wrote about the use of the cards for purposes of divination.

These ideas had a profound influence on the French occultists of the nineteenth century. They were adopted enthusiastically and uncritically to various degrees by such luminaries of the Western tradition as liphas Lvi, Paul Christian, Ren Falconnier, Papus, Stanislas de Guaita, and Oswald Wirth. It seemed not to matter that all these ideas were at best unsupported and at worst outright falsehoods. The French occultists embraced them and made the Tarot the centerpiece of their esoteric philosophy.